Go for it, the point of playing a musical instrument is your pleasure. You may never reach a standard where people will want to pay money to see you perform but who cares. There is great pleasure in learning to express yourself musically or artistically. You are never too old, or too young to start and if you reach a standard where others start to appreciate your work that’s a bonus but do it for you not them.

This reminds me of an old Jack Benny radio program when the Internal Revenue Service meets with him. In going through his tax deductions, they wanted to meet his violin instructor, played by Mel Blanc, aka Bugs Bunny. (Jack always played horribly on the show, but in real life he was quite good) One of the IRS agents asked the instructor how Mr. Benny’s playing was. The instructor said, to put in in a way, that the strings of a violin are made out of cat gut, the bow is made out of horse hair. To think of Mr. Benny’s playing, think of a horse stepping on a cat!

Besides the complete lack of talent or skill or anything resembling competence, I have yet to find an instrument that comes with time as an accessory! But, maybe someday.

I was just making that up - the Ubuntu system is so sketchy with connection-time on some wifi cards, that I thought there were blobs involved.

Thanks for the pejorative, though - let your colors shine through.

I presume you were replying to me. I make no bones about the fact that I think Linux desktop distros are, on the whole, terrible. I started using OS X full time in 2007 after many years of noodling with System 6.x and 7.x, and Mac OS 8 and 9, while at the same time happily using Windows 2000 and then unhappily using Windows XP and Ubuntu. To me, OS X is the perfect desktop OS: strong UNIX underpinnings, excellent UI and usability, tremendous third party applications and (these days) generally good hardware support.

Don’t mistake my dismissal of Ubuntu and other desktop distros as dismissal of Linux and/or FOSS entire. Ubuntu is always my first choice for server deployment (a major UK brand is about to get a new website this week, powered by a web stack of my construction consisting of Ubuntu, Apache, nginx, MySQL, Xen [via AWS], etc). Homebrew gives me a well aggregated selection of GNU and open source tools. Et cetera.

But I’m typing this post on an Apple (wired!) keyboard, connected to an Apple MacBook Pro, running OS X 10.11, connected to an Apple LCD display, listening to an album (M83’s soundtrack to Oblivion) in iTunes, purchased from the iTunes Store. I have countless systems and devices running OS X, iOS, watchOS or tvOS. Yes, I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, but it’s because it’s a place I wanted to put myself. This is in addition to a couple of Dell Windows 10 machines, an HP Microserver running Ubuntu 12.04, and a Zoostorm PC running VMware ESXi 5.5 (which in turn is running a few Ubuntu 12.04 VMs and a pfSense router VM). I usually access these other systems from something running OS X.

I’ve rambled a bit, sorry, but I want to make it crystal clear that I approach any comments I make regarding OSes from a position of personal experience, and if any of those comments are of a pejorative nature, you and others shouldn’t take it personally. I may make pejorative remarks here and elsewhere about what I perceive as crappy desktop distributions, but they are never, ever of an ad hominem nature.

On the rare occasion that the internet is down and I happen to be in front of a computer, I’ve always got a decent amount of work on hand to do. Testing in local VMs, finishing some documentation drafts, working on scripts or fixes, or chasing my co-workers around with a loaded Nerf Firestrike and my best Terminator expression.

I rarely ever get away from the internet entirely these days, aside from the occasional quiet country night drive on twisty back roads. I need to find some new hobbies that don’t involve tech, but that would involve either having a life, or having free time. I’m short on both these days.

I presume you were replying to me. I make no bones about the fact that I think Linux desktop distros are, on the whole, terrible. I started using OS X full time in 2007 after many years of noodling with System 6.x and 7.x, and Mac OS 8 and 9, while at the same time happily using Windows 2000 and then unhappily using Windows XP and Ubuntu. To me, OS X is the perfect desktop OS: strong UNIX underpinnings, excellent UI and usability, tremendous third party applications and (these days) generally good hardware support.

I know we’re getting off topic, but I couldn’t agree with you more. I use Ubuntu Trusty on the desktop at work (because my choice was “…or Windows”) but honestly the desktop experience has driven me up the wall since forever.

(It’s worth noting that I was one of several Canonical people who used Macs and ran Ubuntu in a VM for development purposes (it’s still my preferred development and server platform). We always used to have to work hard to ensure that no spinning beachballs appeared when certain people were around, lest we be ripped a new one).